I’m interrupting our data center tour to post about the turmoil President Trump has caused with his obsession for controlling Greenland.
As with mass tariffs last April, the president has now pushed through the line where Trump-talk — volatile blather easily reversed the next week with little real-world impact — becomes Trump transforming the real world. He’s openly demanding Greenland now, and threatening to use military force to do it.
Here at The Energy Adventure(r), I try to look past most of the craziness and disruption emanating from Washington, for all sorts of reasons. There are other news organizations and analysts focused on these developments as they follow on one another like the finale of a July Fourth fireworks show.
But as far away as Greenland may feel, Trump’s crossing this line bears directly on data centers and artificial intelligence and energy, on the role America will play leading the AI revolution or being overwhelmed by it.
Trump did something like this last April, when his “liberation day” tariff blitz transformed forever the way the world’s economy has functioned for more than a century.
Trump followed through on some of those tariff threats and backed off others. What was important, though, is that America’s trade partners understood that the rules-based international economic order was over.
Ever since, financial institutions, businesses and governments the world over have been groping for a new way forward, with economic stress rising almost everywhere as a result.
All knew there’s no going back.
With this new Greenland push — coming fast on the heels of a military action to capture the head of the Venezuelan state — Trump has struck an equivalent blow against the global security system. Anchored by the same America — always self-interested but usually ways that shared the benefits, even with competitors — that framework of international rules has now been shattered.
Russia broke those rules when it forcibly annexed Crimea in 2014, and again in attempting to swallow Ukraine. Europe, Japan, South Korea and many other countries took advantage of the rules, to one extent or another, to freeload some on their own defense — with America’s blessing and sometimes encouragement.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and America’s security alliances in Asia could survive that.
Only the U.S. could break the system, which is what Trump has now done. The U.S. may wind up “buying” Greenland, whatever might mean. It might annex Greenland. Or Donald Trump may not get Greenland at all, because he changes his mind or is somehow denied. It matters very much which of those comes to be. But not in terms of the system surviving.
NATO is meaningless once its most important member has territorial designs on another member. That’s true whether the coercion works or not in the end.
And if U.S. commitments to Europe are meaningless, so are alliances in Asia.
All know there’s no going back.
As Europe scrambles for its footing with troop deployments to Greenland and speeches at Davos, as Japan’s new Prime Minister calls for new elections, the groping for a new path forward has already begun.
With its anchor pulled up, the international security order is already adrift, just as the global economic order has been since April.
This is not some disaster in the abstract. It bears as concretely on the competition for the three seas we looked at last month as it does the data centers we’re touring now.
Remember that the super-advanced semiconductor chips used in the data centers of Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas are manufactured exclusively in Taiwan with indispensible, irreplaceable machines from Europe and Japan.
The international economic and security order built by the U.S. after World War II — first and foremost for itself, also the benefit of allies — made that happen in some sense.
With both legs now knocked out from under that order, we’ll have to see whether a new system can be found to do the same anywhere near as well.
And in the US energy bills are rising rapidly as the cost of energy increases due to many factors, but a major pull is the drawdown from datacenters:
Energy bills in the U.S. have been rising significantly, with residential electricity prices increasing by about 25% from 2020 to 2024. This rise is largely driven by growing demand from data centers and other commercial users, while residential customers are facing the highest price increases. theinvadingsea.com CNBC
And consumers are shocked by simple use of AI can cost a massive amount of energy:
Before you can ask an AI model to help you with travel plans or generate a video, the model is born in a data center.
Racks of servers hum along for months, ingesting training data, crunching numbers, and performing computations. This is a time-consuming and expensive process—it’s estimated that training OpenAI’s GPT-4 took over $100 million and consumed 50 gigawatt-hours of energy, enough to power San Francisco for three days. It’s only after this training, when consumers or customers “inference” the AI models to get answers or generate outputs, that model makers hope to recoup their massive costs and eventually turn a profit.
“For any company to make money out of a model—that only happens on inference,” says Esha Choukse, a researcher at Microsoft Azure who has studied how to make AI inference more efficient.
As conversations with experts and AI companies made clear, inference, not training, represents an increasing majority of AI’s energy demands and will continue to do so in the near future. It’s now estimated that 80–90% of computing power for AI is used for inference.
All this happens in data centers. There are roughly 3,000 such buildings across the United States that house servers and cooling systems and are run by cloud providers and tech giants like Amazon or Microsoft, but used by AI startups too. A growing number—though it’s not clear exactly how many, since information on such facilities is guarded so tightly—are set up for AI inferencing.
Praxis Group plans to set up cryptocurrency cities:
These Billionaires Bet Big On Greenland—After Trump Took Interest
ByMartina Di Licosa,Forbes Staff. Martina Di Licosa is a reporter covering consumer businessesFollow Author
Jan 09, 2026, 06:30am ESTJan 16, 2026, 07:02pm EST
Topline
Just months after President Donald Trump first expressed interest in the United States possibly gaining control over Greenland, some of the richest people in the world—including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg—began making strategic investments in the mineral-rich island.
A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
When we think of a nation state, we immediately think of the lands, but when we think of a network state, we should instantly think of the minds. That is, if the nation state system starts with the map of the globe and assigns each patch of land to a single state, the network state system starts with the 7+ billion humans of the world and attracts each mind to one or more networks.
Here’s a more complex definition that extends that concept and pre-emptively covers many edge cases:
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
OK, that’s a mouthful! It’s lengthy because there are many internet phenomena that share some but not all of the properties of a network state. For example, neither Bitcoin nor Facebook nor a DAO is a network state, because each lacks certain qualities — like diplomatic recognition — which are core to anything we’d think of as the next version of the nation state.
(If you want to skip ahead, we expand on each part of the definition in Chapter 5. But it’ll make more sense if you read the text all the way through. For what it’s worth, the technical definition of a nation state is similarly multi-clausal, because it needs to exclude things we don’t typically think about, like stateless nations.)
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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